Free Republic

MH17 flight feared to have been shot down over Ukraine was taking a significantly different route to the usual course for flights from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, according to aviation expert. The crashed MH17 flight took a route 300 miles to the north of its usual path, an aviation expert has said. Robert Mark, a commercial pilot who edits Aviation International News Safety magazine, said that most Malaysia Airlines flights from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur normally travelled along a route significantly further south than the plane which crashed. Malaysia Airlines has insisted its plane travelled on an "approved route"...

I guess it worked. I guess the terror-alert system in Washington -- the one that shot to red because two nitwits got lost in their plane -- worked. But the incident was awfully disconcerting. It reminded me of a James Thurber story, "The Day the Dam Broke," that details the chaos that erupted in Columbus, Ohio in 1913 when everyone thought the dam had burst (it didn't). Thurber speculated that the scare started when one man, possibly late for a lunch date with his wife, began to run east. When someone else began to run, perhaps a newsboy in high...